President Raul Castro and others have instituted a series of limited economic reforms, and have warned Cubans that they need to start working harder and expecting less from the government. But the president has also made it clear he has no desire to depart from Cuba's socialist system or embrace capitalism.

Coming back to the subject matter, much as I enjoy the odd punt on the markets, the capitalism model doesn't seem to have worked out too well either. but since every other system was worse maybe it's not so bad.

^ If that is the best argument in favour of capitalism, then it's a crap system, and will fail. It already very nearly did, as we know. To give him his due, Marx was at least partially right. We can actually date the near-death of capitalism to within a few hours in Sep 2008. The phone conversations, the emails, the panicked trades, are all on the record. Most people have no clue how close to the abyss we actually came, because they'd rather not know, they don't want to know.

Quote:

BlackRock owns no private jets, so Fink was on a commercial flight to Singapore the weekend when Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy. He was “shocked” when he heard the news and flew back the next day. “I felt like Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes. I came back and the whole world had changed,” he says. During the next 10 weeks, he would be on the phone to government officials several times a day—logging at least 21 calls with Geithner alone. He also spoke frequently to Paulson, at Treasury, helping to advise on the structuring of tarp, and to his number two, Ken Wilson—frantically calling him at around 6:30 a.m. in the middle of September. “The shit is hitting the fan. Ken, you’ve got to do something,” Fink said of the massive run on the country’s commercial money-market funds that had begun. The funds, including BlackRock’s, were hemorrhaging billions, and Fink told Wilson—who in January joined BlackRock as a vice-chairman—that the government needed to step in and guarantee them before the credit market collapsed, which the Treasury Department did within hours of Fink’s call.

Sorry I don't believe that for one second. Everytime it fails it comes back. Government can also be responsible for bad policies that capitalism gets blamed for. There's no reason to have 3% reserves at banks and there's no reason to have eternal low interest rates. It's the only system that allows people to make mistakes and pay the consequences until they learn because we are talking about humans right? We are also talking about new generations having to be introduced to civilization every time. It's better than philosopher kings running the show. How much history of despotism going back millenia do people need to learn that? Marxism is dry yes, but voting people out is much less violent than constant revolutions. There's just no comparison. The west developed a system that allows EVERYONE to take part because no leaders can concentrate all known knowledge in their heads to run our lives. You must be in some depressed mood of some kind that conservatives usually get into and you need to drink some coffee or something.

If there's a weakness to capitalism is that it was so successful and expanded human living standards beyond anything ever before in human history and now many ignorant people are taking it for granted but are even more empty because they have no solution. There has never been a system that didn't involve some competition and effort required. It's in humans already. The government has to make the rules and needs the private sector to fund it and if the rules are broken then reform is needed. It's always this way.

You have to look at examples of people who actually perform to break the cynicism you're in.